Margaret Atwood is one of the most prolific authors of our time, and it often seems she wears more hats than there are provinces in her native Canada.

Since “The Edible Woman” appeared in 1969, Atwood has produced a dozen more novels, including “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Blind Assassin,” winner of the 2000 Booker Prize.

At 73, she has also written 10 story collections and more than 20 volumes of poetry, plus a small mountain of essays, TV scripts, children’s books, and even collections of drawings. An avid comic book fan, she was a panelist at this year’s Comic-Con, the international comic-book convention.

Q: You’re an atypical writer in that you seem equally at home writing fiction and poetry. How did that come to be?

A: Nobody told me not to. It’s as simple as that. I’m also of an age that when I was growing up there were no creative writing courses in school. We only wrote essays, not fiction or poetry, though you could publish something in the high school yearbook if you had no shame. I did have an encouraging high school English teacher who once said of a paper I wrote, “I can’t understand this at all, so it must be good.” She really said that.

Q: You are very much a 21st-century author. You blog, are on Facebook, and you have more than 300,000 followers on your Twitter account, which you use all the time.

A: I really got into social media almost by mistake. I was building a web page for “Year of the Flood.” I had this idea for a multi-media book launch, and I needed a place where I could put up a calendar and blog about these performances. Tweeting, with the 140-character maximum, is sort of like scribbling on the bathroom wall. It’s not the first time people have used short messages — think of the telegram. Before that there were smoke signals, then the letter, then the telephone.

Q: With your prolific production, are you the Joyce Carol Oates of Canada or is she the Margaret Atwood of the United States?

A: Oh, Joyce is way ahead of me. I think she writes in her sleep.

Q: Who did you read growing up?

A: Gee, who didn’t I read? In my teens I was heavily into sci-fi and detective fiction of all kinds, plus classic English novels by Jane Austen and the Brontes. And the Bible in school. But I also read “Peyton Place,” which I wasn’t supposed to read so I read it atop the garage roof so no one could see me. Later it was Hemingway and Faulkner. And I loved Ray Bradbury and everything by H.G. Wells.

Northrop Frye was a teacher of mine in college. He said sci-fi was inching back to mythology, closing the circle. It’s quite true. You can’t have a talking, burning bush on Earth without a person hallucinating it, but you can have one on Planet X.

Q: You’ve written quite a number of children’s books. Can you talk about the power of myth and fairy tales?

A: I learned to read because I wanted to read comics and no one would read them to me. My parents made the mistake of sending away for a copy of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” Little did they know it was completely unexpurgated, really dark stuff. My little sister was horrified by it but my older brother and I were made of sterner and probably more disturbing stuff.

Q: What was it like seeing “The Handmaid’s Tale” turned into a movie?

A: It was a lot of fun in the process. I got to meet (director and Nobel Prize-winning playwright) Harold Pinter. We were filming in Durham, N.C. There was a moment of humor one day. We were shooting the hanging scene and the door of Duke Chapel opened and a party from a wedding rehearsal came out. They weren’t pleased, needless to say.

Q: What do you think is the central notion of Canadian identity, literary or otherwise?

A: Let’s start with the reaction to “The Handmaid’s Tale” back in 1985. The English said, “Jolly good yarn.” Canadians said, “Could that happen here?” Canadians are always a bit nervous because of who is on our southern border. It doesn’t matter to Americans what happens in Ottawa, but it matters a great deal to us what happens in Washington. We know more about you than you do us.

Another thing is that there is a certain reserve in us. You know your expression, “The best thing since sliced bread.” Our equivalent of that is, “Not bad.” And supremely high praise is, “Not bad at all.”

Q: Is there any novel of yours that’s a personal favorite, or is it invariably the one you’re working on?

A: How did you guess that? (Laughs.) Ah, what else am I going to say? But I’m doing a serialized project on byliner.com. I’m going back to Charles Dickens. He wrote installments, or numbers, in periodicals. It was almost like a TV series.

Q: I have to ask: Are you a hockey fan?

A: Is the pope Catholic? You’re not allowed to be Canadian if you’re not a hockey fan.

William Porter: 303-954-1877, wporter@denverpost.com or twitter.com/williamporterdp

Restaurant critic William Porter is a feature writer at The Denver Post, where he covers food, culture and people. He joined the news outlet in 1997. Before that, he spent 14 years covering politics and popular culture at The Phoenix Gazette and Arizona Republic. He is a native of North Carolina.

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